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As promised via last week's various Vine and/or Instagram teases, yesterday brought not the second trailer for Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days Of Future Past but something much more interesting. From midnight Monday night to midnight Tuesday night, Empire Magazinedropped new "collectible" magazine covers at the start of every hour featuring about 20 characters characters from Bryan Singer's mutant sequel (there were two covers respectively of Wolverine, Magneto, and Professor X, two Sentinel covers, and one for director Bryan Singer) . You can check them out here. I thought we were getting a trailer yesterday, but I was wrong. This was actually a superior marketing tool. It highlighted the film's key selling point, its ridiculously large cast, in way that left the film itself unspoiled. More importantly, it kept fans talking about the film all day long.

Whether or not you like the images themselves (fan verdict ismixed), it was an ingenious play by 20th Century Fox to basically keep movie sites and mainstream entertainment sites talking about the summer 2014 tent pole for the entire day on a regular and consistent basis. And by debuting the covers at midnight on the 27th and going until midnight on the 28th, it also keeps those photos in the news cycle for at least the first part of today. Who needs spoilery trailers when you just need a magazine photo, or 25 of them in this case? This magazine cover blitz accomplishes the same goal as a trailer, arguably more effectively since it keeps the film in the news cycle for basically at least 36 hours, without spoiling a single plot thread or character beat of the upcoming sequel.

It's no surprise that the first images unveiled were giant Sentinels. The giant robots, which have been a prime visual image for those X-Men fans who grew up on the 1990's Fox animated series and the 1991 arcade game, has thus far been absent from the feature film franchise save for a single detached head briefly seen in a fantasy scenario (a battle simulation in a place called "The Danger Room") in X-Men: The Last Stand. I bring this up because it is one of the major "added value elements" that this X-Men sequel, the eighth in the long-running series, has to offer. The live-action debut of these mechanical monsters will be a major selling point for longtime fans who maybe tuned out a little after X-Men: The Last Stand nearly eight years ago.

The other big sell is obviously the whole "franchise all-stars to the rescue" shtick. 20th Century Fox hopes that a combination of nearly every major X-Men character from the various installments coming together will kick the franchise into box office overdrive in a manner similar to Universal's Fast Five in 2011. While the series rebounded with 2009's Fast & Furious, it was Fast Five that turned the B-level street racing and hijacking series into an A-level action series. It helped that Fast Five was a stunningly good film, the best in the series by a mile, but either way the fifth film ended up with $626 million worldwide, up from the $363m earned by Fast and Furious.

Despite its reputation as a top-drawer series, no X-Men film has ever approached $500 million worldwide at the box office. The hope is that this glorified class reunion can at least kick the series into upper-level Marvel territory (think the $620m-$640m of Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World). In a relatively lightweight summer season, even a somewhat aged X-Men franchise is one of the biggest films of the season by default. Considering how well The Wolverine did overseas thanks to (among other things) its 3D conversion (it earned $418m worldwide, with a franchise-high $282m overseas), it stands to reason that X-Men: Days Of Future Past is a pretty safe bet as long as it's at least as "good" as X-Men: The Last Stand ($459m, still the franchise's biggest grosser).

A film as good as X-Men: First Class combined with the return of fan-favorite actors (Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, etc.) certainly has the potential to bring the franchise to new heights. X-Men: Days of Future Past opens May 23rd, 2014. As always, we'll see.